As president of Maritz Travel, I’m committed to bringing people together for special experiences in a face-to-face environment. In-person experiences have and continue to make a significant difference for many organizations, as well as their people. Our clients look to us to help design and deliver experiences that matter. Meetings, events, and incentive travel are significant investments, and there’s no substitute that can promote as much value when it comes to achieving key objectives involving your people. In short, investments have to pay off in a big, big way, and they do with the right approach.

When I came to Maritz Travel three years ago, I brought more than 18 years of experience and a full view of the travel and tourism industry with me. My varied background has enabled me to better understand how to attract and retain the right people. By doing this, we are able to create the ideal framework for these important business exchanges that our clients are looking to facilitate. Our goal is to sit down with a client and begin what we hope will turn into a very long-range relationship. We earn that business by measuring our results and proving the value that we offer—and a lot of that comes from our ability to understand human behavior to create experiences that truly last a lifetime.

As part of the Maritz portfolio of businesses, we’ve taken the time to understand human behavior through the Maritz Institute. But, to make this work actionable and relevant, we’re taking this knowledge, marrying it with design principles informed by experience expert Jim Gilmore’s work, and applying it to large-scale meetings, events, and incentive-travel approaches.

How does all of this make a difference? Let’s take an example of an organization that wants to create an experience that recognizes and rewards top performers. Just having an “incentive travel” opportunity isn’t enough; it has to be effective in driving better results for the organization and an experience opportunity that their people would desire. It’s a matter of building a strategy from A to Z that best excites, engages, and extends that experience. Our 360-degree view, step-by-step approach—grounded in the client’s organizational goals and objectives—takes a typical event and transforms it into an exceptional, memorable, and truly valued experience.

This is the approach we are bringing to more than 2,500 annual corporate events and 11,000 association events. As we look around, we’re seeing global clients that want us to design and execute all around the world. We are structuring our business to ensure our approach translates globally to meet their demands. In doing so, we’ll be able to help businesses around the world connect with their audiences in more significant ways.